Network Setup: Falcon Player FPP with Falcon F16v3 Controller

I found a need to highly document an easy approach for users to setup a Raspberry Pi Falcon Player (FPP) with WiFi so that I could access the FPP connected to a Falcon F16v3 over the E1.31 (Ethernet) both from my house PC.

Here’s my layout:

There are 7 steps you need to setup in order to correctly connect from your local computer in your house. This tutorial assumes you already have the Falcon Player on a Pi installed (i’m running v1.8) and v2.00 on the Falcon F16v3 controller.

First Step

You need to have everything wired up like I have in the above layout. A WiFi module plugged into a Raspberry Pi (or use a Raspberry Pi 3 with a built in WiFi Chip), I used a Edimax module I had laying around that supports Linux. An Ethernet (CAT5) cable setup between the left Falcon RJ45 input and the Ethernet input of the Raspberry Pi.

Second Step (wlan0)

Have the wlan0 (WiFi) of your FFP network setup for DHCP and obtain your local IP address for the Raspberry Pi, mine is 192.168.0.8 which is set by a router, or you can setup a static IP that is of the same subnet class of your router. Make sure your Pi is logged into the router with an SSID and password.

There should also be a DNS of the router, mine is 192.168.0.1 remember this number because you’ll need it for when you setup both the controller and Falcon Player network settings. If using DHCP, no need to manually set it up for wlan0. Below is a picture of my wireless setup. You can ping to make sure you have good connection access.

(Hint 2: if you have multiple Falcon Player’s in your show, be sure to use a different HostNames, as this makes it easier to connect to when setting up and checking your display.)

Third Step (eth0)

Understand the end goal is to setup the Raspberry Pi to pass-through local network data to and from the falcon or equivalent controller. In order to do this you need to setup the local FPP with a separate subnet that still works on your primary house router. An example of this is changing the third octet to something else.

Local house subnet example (house and Rasp Pi): 192.168.0.xxx

Local Pi to Controller example: 192.168.1.yyy

Next you setup a static IP address on the eth0 device of the FPP, in my example I chose 192.168.1.100 which is different from my wlan0 subnet octet with a IP address of 192.168.0.8 as can be seen in my setup pictures. Setup a Netmask of 255.255.255.0 and LEAVE the Gateway blank!! When you’re done press the ‘Update Interface‘.

Next setup the DNS to the same settings as the wlan0 which in my case is 192.168.0.1 for both the primary and secondary. Then press the Update DNS and Restart the DNS buttons. You might need to reboot the Raspberry Pi for good measure.

Fourth Step (Routing)

This is a simple step, because we need those from time to time. Make sure you check the box at the bottom of the Networking page of the Falcon Player so that you “Enable Routing between network interfaces”. This is very important if you want the Falcon controller to have internet access or to be reached from your house PC.

Fifth Step (Enable E1.31)

This is another easy step to miss, was my primary reason I dug around the internet so long. The communication won’t work between the boards if you don’t enable the channel outputs to talk via eth0 and enable it. Go to the Input/Output Setup tab and select Channel Outputs. See the picture below for what to enable and select. (Don’t worry that I don’t have Universes setup yet).

Sixth Step (Falcon F16v3)

Lets move to the Falcon F16v3 controller or whatever controller you’re using. This is the smart pixel RGB controller that provides power to your LEDs and tells them what color and intensity to be in your sequence. We’re going to setup the network so its working with the Falcon Player.

First thing to do is make it a static IP, then make sure its apart of our eth0 subnet mask, but not the same IP address. So for my controller IP address i’ll pick 192.168.1.50 so it doesn’t match the eth0 IP address of 192.168.1.100. Then setup the subnet mask as 255.255.255.0 which should be default for most.

A very important item to setup correctly is the Gateway address of the controller. To make this whole thing work right you need to set the gateway address to the same address as the primary FPP eth0 IP address. Which in my case is 192.168.1.100, don’t be alarmed or confused, just make sure they match.

Make the DNS primary and secondary the same as the house router, so in my case 192.168.0.1 will do just fine. Press the ‘Restart Interface’ button when finished.

Seventh Step (PC Routing)

Almost done, you’re on your way to accessing both the Falcon Player and Falcon Controller remotely. Way to go!

In this last step we need to tell your local PC that you have another subnet mask actually located behind the Raspberry Pi, because your router isn’t that smart to know whats behind it. So to do this we setup a PC IP route to point your PC to the Raspberry Pi which in tern accepts the alternative subnet and directs the data to the Falcon Controller for access. See its Simple!

First, open up the MS command prompt (CMD) as administrator. Right click it in the search, select Run as admin.

Then type into the prompt the following, with your Falcon Controller IP address, the subnet mask and the wlan0 IP address of the controller. The -p means this is going to be a permanent assignment. you can replace ‘add’ with ‘delete’ if you make a mistake. For my local laptop I setup the following:

>> route add 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.8 -p

And that’s it!! now open a browser and type in your IP address of the Falcon Player and the IP address of the Falcon Controller to start setting up your devices.

Hope this was helpful.

This tutorial should relate to all Falcon Controllers like the F16v3, F4v3, F16v2, F16v2r, F4v2

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I tried his solution and was not able to connect to the controller after adding routing to the computer.
Trying to ping the controller IP. I get “TLL expired in transit”. This means the router is misconfigured which caused the packages going on private IP address were leaked to the internet. You can do tracert command or look at router log to see it never returned.

To fix this you must
1) add Static Routing to point destination IP (controller IP) to the wlan0 IP (Raspberry Pi WiFi IP)

or
2) setup forwarding or NAT policy to direct all incomming requests of Controller IP to the Raspberry Pi.

Yes you’re correct, if the router isn’t handling the route correctly and adding the PC side route isn’t good enough, and if your router can handle static routing (mine couldn’t), not to be confused with port forwarding. Then yes you can setup another alternative to communicate within your house network.

Seems really strange that if your controller IP is still a subnet of the wlan that pointing to the raspberry pi to handle the IP wouldn’t help. Are you sure you had the Falcon controller setup to route the information to the controller in the ‘Fourth step’?

hello
I write from Italy and my name is Marzio
I want to realize the light show for Christmas 2018.
I’m in possession of raspberry pi v3, I followed all the directions imaginable but I can not connect him to wi-fi
can you help me?
thank you

Perfect! Glad I could help you. I think one of the Falcon Controller setting tabs is made for serial DMX devices. Once setup, i’d assume the channel ports menu would adjust? Haven’t tried a Picap, so I don’t have a good answer for you. Sorry.

Because of your interest in the Rasberry Pi, I was wondering why those who use the Pi for their Christmas lights don’t just run their pixels straight from a dedicated PC, using the PC’s Ethernet port, and through the Falcon (or, in my case AlphaPix and SanDeivce) light controllers to control the smart pixels? I’ve been a little confuse why hobbyists would go through the mechanics of the Pi (besides it just being so much fun to do so). I have port in my home office (where my dedicated show PC is), which I connect to, which runs to a port in a front eave of my house. There, I have a network switch, from where I run a Cat 5 cable to each of my light controllers. Easy peasy. Adding new or modified sequences to my show is so simple, and there is no messing with the Pi.

Great questions. My main thing is cost and convenience. Having a Raspberry Pi only costs ~$37, I can have it close to my display and the latest version 3 B model has WiFi built into it. So my Falcon Player (SW) is on my localhost network and I can remote into it via a webpage on my network. Meaning I can sit at my PC and load new sequences to it, schedule it to come on without my PC needing to be turned on. Its all on the same timer in my garage. Personally its way more convenient.

Thanks for this info. I must be miiing something. I was all set up with this wireless as a 2 months ago David helped me set up. Eveything was working good until last week lights did not come on. It turned out my micro sd card was corrupt. I reformated eveything and can log into the fpp wired only. I don’t know what I have wrong. Please can you help me?

These days 100Base-T or 1000Bast-T don’t require crossover cables, they’ve solved this with newer Ethernet protocols that don’t require cross over anymore. Even when I do peer-to-peer connection at work with oscilloscopes I use standard cabling.